The president of Burkina Faso, Roch Marc Christian Kabore officially inaugurated a 15 MW hybrid PV plant at the end of last week, which will provide power to the Essakane Gold mine in the Sahel region.
The project, the construction of which started exactly a year earlier, was built next to, and synchronized with, Finland-based Wärtsilä's 55 MW oil driven power plant, and is one of the largest hybrid fuel/solar plants in the world.
Wärtsilä was in charge of overseeing the EPC works of the solar portion of the plant, and also the control system for the hybrid plant.
According to Iamgold’s president, Stephen Letwin, the solar facility, which will deliver energy to the off-grid gold mine located 330 kilometers northeast of Burkina Faso‘s capital city, Ouagadougou, will also allow a reduction of around 18 500 tones of CO2 and the saving of around six million liters of fuel per year.
The solar portion of the project is relying on 130,000 thin film panels provided by U.S. manufacturer, First Solar, Inc.
Wärtsilä completed another utility-scale hybrid power plant that unites a large fuel-based power station with a solar PV park last year. The Finnish company connected AES Jordan’s 250 MW Smart Power Generation plant driven by heavy oil with a 46 MW solar PV park.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.